Castle Magus

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

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"Wil Wheaton on His Star Trek Family and His New Podcast Storytime with Wil Wheaton"

"Hi everyone, happy Tuesday! I am so excited for this week’s episode. I’m talking to the one and only Wil Wheaton! You know Wil from his roles as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation, Gordie in Stand By Me and his appearances on The Big Bang Theory. Wil is also a super-nerd and a prolific audiobook reader. He has a new podcast called Storytime with Wil Wheaton, where he reads a new short speculative fiction story each episode and I highly recommend it! We had such a lovely conversation— Wil is a deep thinker and one of the kindest people I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him a little bit better! Stick around after the interview for the hindsight, where my producer Jeph and I talk about the episode, as well as some upcoming live podcast recordings, our new Patreon and oh yeah, time travel!"

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Apparently the only thing you have to do to get me to watch an entire hour and a half episode of your podcast is simply to have Wil Wheaton on as the guest for that episode. Like so.

Also, it's kind of funny, because I'm sure most other geeknerds (or is the proper term "nerdgeeks"? *shrug*) like me would know Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. Here's the thing, though... I have never seen anything of Battlestar Galactica, either the 2004 version or the original show or anything else, outside of maybe an occasional clip on Youtube or something that I don't even remember now. (I always tend to get it confused with Babylon 5, as well, which is another geeknerd show that starts with the letter "B" and of which I have yet to see a single episode. How far in the toilet is my geeknerd cred now?) Nor have I seen any of that other nerdgeek stuff like all that Star Wars stuff mentioned on her Wikipedia page there. What I have seen a fair bit of her in, though, is Longmire, because there is an over-the-air TV channel which I don't recall the name of right now that my sister watches, and it airs a metric assload of Longmire episodes, back to back, on at least a weekly if not daily basis, and I see bits and pieces of it whenever I happen to exit my room to go the kitchen or something (also stuff like Stargate SG-1 and The Closer/Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles and NCIS and whatever else that channel [those channels?] tend to air, but that's beside the point). Beyond that, I have no other experience with pretty much anything Katee Sackhoff has done, unfortunately. At least as of right now. So far. Yet.

Okay, so...

There's a fair bit of overlap here with what Wil said in the Mayim Bialik podcast and what he has said on his own blog, but there's a lot of stuff that's new, too. That's one of the cool things about Wil is that even if he's telling largely the same story as one he's told before, elsewhere, he's still able to put a new spin on it. It's not just the same thing, over and over.

At one point, early on, Wil says that if he could give up all of his acting success if it meant that he would instead have a normal childhood where he had parents who weren't terrible, he would do it in a heartbeat. However, later on, about halfway into the episode, when asked about if he could time travel and change something, would he do it, he says that if he could go back and change the bad things about his childhood, he would not do it, if it meant that it led to him never meeting Anne, his wife. It was an interesting contrast. His acting career he would sacrifice in a moment, if it meant he could instead have had a good childhood with loving parents, but not his wife and her kids that he later adopted as his own. By the way, his stories about his wife's children, separately, asking him to formally, officially adopt them when they were each 18 was very touching.

Oh, and the short story they were talking about is Wikihistory. I'm glad Wil mentioned it because it gave me an excuse to read it again (this will be the fourth of fifth time now). In fact, I literally paused the video, then went and read it again, before returning to the video. It's definitely as good as he says it is (though he did get some of the details about it wrong, i.e. there was no "baby Schlimmel" or whatever).

And the fish story is this one or one of several like it told by Michio Kaku.

Finally... I haven't gotten around to it as of yet, but I think I'm going to start actually making the time to go through It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton now. Perhaps even getting started right now, in fact.

"There's always going to be shitty people in the world, that's just how it is, but we can choose whether we're going to be one of them."

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

Also, this, which he has embedded in that post there:

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"'I Survived Being a Child Star' Wil Wheaton: How to Heal Trauma & Believing Aliens are Out There"

"Wil Wheaton (TBBT, bestselling author, award-winning audiobook narrator, host of It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton) is back in the MBB studio, and he's opening up like never before about his deeply personal journey as a trauma survivor. From grappling with the scars of being raised by emotionally immature and narcissistic parents to surviving abuse on a movie set, he shares the emotional tools and therapies that have helped him heal, including EMDR and IFS therapy. He dives into the mind-bending connections between quantum physics, nonlinear time, and reparenting your inner child, while exploring fascinating topics like extraterrestrial life, simulation theory, and telepathy. Get ready for an eye-opening conversation on how trauma has shaped every aspect of Wil's life, his thoughts on the dangers of spiritual charlatans, and his cautious approach to psychedelics. Don't miss this thought-provoking as we connect the dots between science, spirituality, and the unknown!"

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From Mr. Wheaton's post above:

"You also get to see me get triggered in real time, realize it, recover from it, and address what happened. It’s a little embarrassing to see myself fuck up like that, in public no less, and be reactive when I want to be responsive, but I feel like it could be a valuable teaching moment and that’s worth a little embarrassment, if it’s helpful to literally anyone else in the world."

Anyway, outside of occasional full episodes of Some More News or Last Week Tonight (which I usually watch at 2x speed), or shorter clips from things like Castle Super Beast (which I also usually watch at 2x speed), I don't normally make time to just sit back and listen to podcasts like this. But I did that for this one (at 1x speed, even), and I'm glad I did.

And it seems like I, too, have some "homework" now, which is to watch Arrival at some point and maybe also look into Sugar.

Just watched both of those films for the first time, both based on books by Richard Adams (which I have not read, yet) and both made by the same animation company, even sharing some actors (e.g. John Hurt voiced one of the main characters in each). Not going to say much about either of them, except this: I'd always heard about Watership Down and how traumatizing it supposedly is, and yeah, it gets pretty visceral at times. (Though I came out of it with a feeling of "Was that it? Was that all there was to it? That wasn't so bad.") But... well... Watership Down might as well be Winnie the Pooh or something compared to The Plague Dogs. Holy shit. o_O

Granted, this is me as a 46 year old saying that. If I'd seen these movies when I was a kid, they probably would've messed me up something fierce. (And I'm still saying The Plague Dogs kind of did mess me up a little bit, even now.)

(EDIT 2) I've since read the Group Ibex translation, and I believe it is indeed better, or at least more readable, than the one I initially read, as mentioned below. It's also somewhat more consistent, terminology-wise, to Disco Elysium. (/EDIT 2)

Or Püha ja õudne lõhn in the original Estonian, written by Robert Kurvitz, of Disco Elysium fame. The book, written before the game, shares the same overall world/setting, but otherwise has little to do with the game. I.e. you won't be seeing Harry or Kim in this book, or even mentions of them. While Revachol is mentioned, the story never actually goes there, outside of one seemingly unrelated, added-after-initial-publication epilogue. Available in English via unofficial fan translation, here. If an official translation ever became available for sale, I might consider buying it, but only if the money actually goes to Kurvitz, and not to the current ZA/UM asshats. (EDIT) As it turns out, it seems that I read an earlier translation, different from the one above, which is, apparently, inferior to the one linked above? Well shit. Guess I'll need to read it again with the later translation at some point. (/EDIT)

I just finished reading it last night/this morning. I'm honestly not sure I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Disco Elysium, but I liked it well enough. It was interesting seeing references to places and historical figures mentioned in DE, and things like the Pale are definitely involved, but other than that, there isn't anything to connect it to DE (not that that should be the only reason to read it, but I probably never even would have heard of the book, let alone read it, without the existence of Disco Elysium).

Plot summary, without spoilers. Four young girls, the Lund children (Maj, 5, Anni-Elin, 12, Målin, 13, and Charlotte, 14), disappear pretty much into thin air, as far as anyone can tell. Twenty years later, three men named Inayat Khan, Jesper de la Guardie, and Tereesz Machejek, all of whom were around the same ages as the Lund girls when they disappeared, are still obsessed with finding out what happened to the girls. Over the years, there have been vague clues/hints/leads that keep hope alive for them, so to speak, on which they follow up. The story is told in a very back and forth way, splitting time between the present, where the three men are still searching, and the past flashbacks of their interactions with the Lund girls. Along the way, there are also shorter chapters of world-building tidbits of some obscure history or concepts that may seem unrelated at first, but which usually come into play in the following chapters, or which provide context to otherwise no-context references in earlier chapters, at least a little.

On a technical level, though... the book... uh... well... it's not the best book I've ever read. Let's go with that. It's rather obtuse, in a lot of ways. That may be a translation issue, though, I don't know. (EDIT) See above edit about different English translations floating around out there. (/EDIT) In any case, the writing of (the English version [EDIT] that I read [/EDIT] of) Sacred and Terrible Air does not hold a candle to the writing in Disco Elysium.

Also, the book was, apparently, intended as a sort of prologue to a much longer series of books, which never got written, because of how poorly this first book sold. That... well... puts the ending of the book in a different light, if nothing else. Also, if Kurvitz had wrote more books, that means Disco Elysium probably wouldn't have ever existed, and I may or may not have ever heard of the book series, as a result.

I won't say more, for spoilers, but I will say that it has made me want to play Disco Elysium again, even if the specifics of the story of Sacred and Terrible Air has little to do with the story of DE overall.

I might watch/listen to the Woolie VS "Let's Read" of the book at some point, as well, as I'd avoided doing so until now, since I hadn't read it myself yet.

Also, considering what "ZA/UM" means in the actual book (which I won't say here, because spoilers), it's kind of ironically appropriate that the company that made Disco Elysium was named ZA/UM, given what ended up happening with that. ¬_¬ (That's a new tag there, only created today, so while I think I got all of the posts I made about ZA/UM and DE there, I might've missed some. In any case, most of the ZA/UM related bullshit is there, anyway.) Seriously, current ZA/UM needs to die, with extreme prejudice, and the entire Elysium IP needs to revert back to Kurvitz, et al.

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."

...went to check it out... and it's locked to fucking Kobo.

Even if I do already have a Kobo app on my phone, from where I bought that Seanan McGuire stuff last year (though I have not bothered to try to read any of that at all yet), I still have no interest whatsoever in buying any thing else from Humble if it requires this shit.

Oh well. Humble just saved me from spending $18, I guess. It would have been a really good deal, otherwise. *shrug*

Also, if you don't live in the United States, then fuck you, apparently.

And it is a guy who John Scalzi once described as someone who "revealed himself to be a craven sycophantic remora enthusiastically attached to Trump's sphincter, and is apparently happy to toss democracy aside for his own personal advancement" and as "an arriviste when it comes [to] ambitious culture war neo-fascism." Also as a "notable Trump-tonguer and excitable nouveau-fascist."

Also, he apparently wrote some shitty book that was later made into a shitty movie directed by Ron Howard. So, those are things that happened and exist, too. *eye roll* (Disclaimer: I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, nor do I intend to ever do so, because why should I invest my time in reading a shitty book[1] or watching a shitty movie?)

So yeah, that all tracks. Just one more reason to toss onto the mountain of reasons why Trump should not be elected as POTUS again, because if Trump wins and something happens to him, then this numbnuts asshat would become the POTUS. (I mean, that would still be a nominal step up from Trump himself, of course, but only nominally.)

[1] - I mean, aside from Varney the Vampire or Reality Hunger, anyway. I guess the difference here is that I already strongly suspect that Hillbilly Elegy would be a shitty book and movie from the first moment I ever heard of them (which was today, just before I started typing this entry here), which wasn't the case with those other two, going in. (See also.)

Heard most of this on NPR via the car radio a little while ago. Everything about about that shit is just infuriating. I was literally holding up a middle finger to the radio whenever DeSantis's voice came on the air.

A post on John Scalzi's Whatever.

Some Hugo/awards stuff, which is irrelevant to me and about which I am mostly apathetic, good or bad.

Some GQP speaker stuff and some Trump stuff about which I fully agree, because to hell with that whole banal lot entirely. To hell with Trump, in particular, because Trump's corpulent shadow is all over the GQP speaker stuff as well, regardless of what may be going on in GA at the moment, because the GQP is absurdly asinine like that.

And some tentative Israel/Gaza stuff, with which I also agree, at least on the technicalities of it, in that I also don't want to touch that topic with a ten foot pole, except to say that I don't want to touch that topic with a ten foot pole. Like Mr. Scalzi, I do have opinions on the matter which are similar to the mostly innocuous ones expressed by Mr. Scalzi here, but unlike Mr. Scalzi, I have no plans to possibly write something more in depth about it later.

A post on John Scalzi's website.

Apparently, somebody said some things in Hungary at an awards thing that was attended by John Scalzi, and other somebodies got offended by the things that were said, just in general and, more specifically, on behalf of Mr. Scalzi. The one who said the things has apologized, both in general and to Mr. Scalzi in particular. Mr. Scalzi himself was not offended, doesn't think the apology was necessary, doesn't think there was anything worth being offended over (while admitting that he is not entirely familiar with Hungarian politics or social mores and pitfalls and such), and doesn't want anyone to be offended on his behalf.